Elise Anderson
Dr. Elise Anderson is director of the Transnational Repression Initiative at the New Lines Institute, where she leads the organization’s research, convenings, and policy engagement on how authoritarian states reach across borders to target dissidents, critics, and entire diaspora communities. She also works on the Institute’s Mass Atrocities and International Law (MAIL) portfolio.
Anderson has spent nearly two decades engaged in work on Uyghur issues around the globe, including four years living and conducting original ethnographic and archival research in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region between 2012 and 2016. Prior to her current role, she was a Nonresident Senior Fellow at New Lines and held roles at Freedom House, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. She has testified before Canada’s House of Commons and the Uyghur Tribunal, interpreted between Uyghur and English before a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and given dozens of talks at universities and other institutions. Her commentary has appeared in major media outlets, and her research has been published in scholarly and public-facing journals.
Anderson is a professorial lecturer at the George Washington University, teaching in both the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and a Nonresident Visiting Scholar at GW’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies. She is also a consultant on an archival project in the CoDHerS lab at the University of British Columbia and a Developmental Editor at Stray Cats Ink. She serves on the board of Ana Care and Education, a Uyghur language school in Fairfax, VA, as well as on the steering committees of the International Network for Critical China Studies and the Xinjiang Documentation Project.
She holds dual Ph.D. degrees in Central Eurasian Studies and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University-Bloomington. She is an alumna of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and Fulbright-Hays and was a National Finalist for the White House Fellowship in 2022.
